


Beauty and the Ill-Luck Child

by threewalls



Category: KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Babies, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-03-28
Updated: 2012-03-27
Packaged: 2017-11-02 15:02:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threewalls/pseuds/threewalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a village by the mountains, two children are born: one the most beautiful boy-child ever seen, the other the ugliest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beauty and the Ill-Luck Child

When the most beautiful girl in the village began to swell, began to grow thicker around the middle, the whole village caught its breath. She was to be a young mother, only fifteen, and as if it could be possible, more beautiful as the woman she was becoming for the love she held for her sweetheart, who doted on her, and for her unborn child. 

She was married to her sweetheart in the late fall, and all winter long, the village waited. Heedless to the village's fears, she played jazz records on her gramophone and sang to her baby as she shaped gyoza for her husband's family or swept the tatami of the little room she shared with her husband at the eastern side of his family's enclosure. When her baby tossed and trembled within her, she laughed and said that she was surely carrying a dancer, a child who would love life and music as much as she.

In the summer, the girl gave birth to a baby boy, and the girl's mother-in-law gasped as she washed him, for he was not merely a beautiful baby. He was the most beautiful baby boy that she had ever seen. With shaking hands, the mother-in-law wrapped the baby and gave him to the girl. For the first time since she had discovered herself with child, the girl shaped her lips from a smile to something else. 

The sweetheart and now husband of the most beautiful girl in the village was not beautiful himself. His soul was kind and his smile lit up his face, but it was a homely face, a face that would never disappear into the mountains never to return. He did not cry until his mother had left, sinking to the floor with the weight of his poor son's fate. His wife did not cry; she sat by her husband, pressing her steady shoulder to his that was shaking, and rocked the baby in her arms.

It was summer then. They would have time to plan.

The first time the baby left the household was the day the notary came down from the mountains to visit the village, calling forth all the babies that had been born that year to be added to his paper scroll, unfurling in cascading waves in the reception room of the wealthiest man in the village.

When their time came, the most beautiful girl and her husband stepped forward together, their baby in her arms. When asked to present the baby, she held the cloths around him and uncovered only his dear face, glowing fat cheeks and shining soft hair.

The notary, a man of little emotion, was seen to dip his pen and then to dip it again.

"What is the name of your child?" the notary asked, pen poised above the scroll.

" _Her_ name is Megumichikakonatsukomiraiakikohayakashokonaokoryokohisamimurasaki..."

The notary only smiled his oily smile, only scratched sharp-pointed syllables line after line, as quickly as the name could be spoken, for it was a common attempt for parents of particularly beautiful boy-children to gift names that they hoped were so long and complicated so as to cause an error in their accounting, some hoped for loophole that meant that when the time came, their son would not be called. When the father finally could no more and paused for heaving breaths, the notary only looked at them, no, at their child, and remarked: "I think in the case of your _daughter_ , my master might make an exception."

Gossip is like fire, moving from roof to roof. The story of a baby girl so beautiful that she might grow to tempt the old man of the mountains was known across the village by dawn, and the village breathed again. The old man of the mountains would be pleased that their village had produced such a beautiful child, so much more beautiful than any of their sons (and so all other families quietly rejoiced).

\---

Two years later, at the narrow dog end of winter, in a different family, a mother who had done all this before, twice, gave birth to what the midwife agreed was the ugliest baby boy that she had seen in over fifty years in her profession. 

"You could raise him as a girl," the midwife said, and waved an outstretched pinky finger. "It's tiny."

The mother had been hoping for a girl-child, another pair of hands to attend to the house and be a calming influence on her growing, boisterous boys. Someone for whom she would not have to watch grow with her heart in her throat, waking each morning to a chill fear that could not be dispelled until she had seen that her two sons run freely, shouting in the courtyard. 

The old man of the mountains cared not especially for girl children, the Akanishi girl notwithstanding. She had turned out to be a sickly child, so rarely seen that the best proof of her continued existence was the lush growth in her family's fields, in the traders that arrived first and stayed longest within the Akanishi family walls. 

This ugly child was something else-- he would be offended by this child, her child. The woman looked around the room, thinking of the household, of her boys already running, of her husband and his brothers and their nieces and nephews already underfoot. She had hoped for a child who would not be taken away; now she hoped that the family would survive it.

When the notary arrived among the drifting blossoms of spring, the woman and her husband were first in line, in front of the parents still thinking of other names to gift their children. 

"You may--" the notary began.

"Kazuya," the mother said, before her notary could finish or her husband could speak.

The notary raised an eyebrow, but the scratching of his pen was no less even. "I also need to see the babe."

The mother sighed, and raised her son entire from the swaddling clothes. Someone behind her shrieked. The other parents murmured, a tide of titters and gossip and pity. 

The notary froze in disgust, his pen nib still poised against the paper, ink seeping, pooling. Finally, he shouted for the mother to cover her child, to remove _it_ from the room. Where the notary had written "Kazuya," there was now only an inkblot in the shape of a turtle with its head pulled in so that it, too, did not have to look.


End file.
